Legion of Angels News Archive

HARRISBURG, Pa. - In an election where so many voters are hungry for “change,” both candidates are trying to position themselves as the one who can deliver it in Washington. Barack Obama has made famous the tagline “change we can believe in.” The first word in one of John McCain’s oft-used campaign slogans is “reform,” and in recent weeks on the stump he has begun emphasizing his reputation as a “maverick.”

But reading between the lines this week, voters may have gotten a glimpse of who the real reformer is. Although the public back-and-forth between McCain and Obama has focused mostly on energy, residing at the root of the candidates’ political attacks may be a fundamental difference in their style of governance.

This most recent debate started around the time McCain released an ad stating that Obama would support an “energy tax” if elected president. This point came from an interview that the Illinois senator did with the San Antonio Express-News in which he was asked about increasing taxes on wind power to fund education. “What we ought to tax is dirty energy like coal and, to a lesser extent, natural gas,” Obama said, but such a tax is not actually a part of his economic proposals.

Both candidates support a form of cap-and-trade in which polluters are allowed to emit only a certain amount of greenhouse gases but can purchase extra pollution credits from less-polluting companies. Because “dirty energy” producers would likely be forced to purchase additional credits, a cap-and-trade system could in some ways be seen as an “energy tax” — but then both Obama and McCain would be in favor of it. The only difference between them would be how high the cap and how expensive the credit.

Obama responded to McCain’s attack with an ad of his own alleging that the Arizona senator was “in the pocket” of the big oil companies and “wants to give them another four billion in tax breaks.” Although this is technically true, these tax breaks would come from a significant cut in the corporate tax rate across the board, which McCain argues would help spur growth and increase employment levels.

The apparent hypocrisy of Obama’s commercial was certainly not lost on the McCain campaign, which quickly pointed out that Obama had supported the last round of tax breaks for big oil companies contained in the so-called Bush-Cheney energy bill. According to an article in the Washington Post written at the time of bill’s passage, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 included “an estimated $85 billion worth of subsidies and tax breaks for most forms of energy — including oil and gas,” renewable energies and nuclear power.

McCain refused to support the president’s bill, and at the time said his opposition was due to the large number of funding packages targeted at special interests — specifically Big Oil. He even mused to his colleagues in Congress at the time: “I wonder what it’s going take to make the case for fiscal sanity here?”

Although Obama voted for the bill, he too remarked that he felt the bill was misguided, saying in his speech on the Senate floor that he voted for the bill “reluctantly,” calling it “a step forward,” but “not a very big step.”

So while both senators saw major problems with the 2005 energy bill, Obama decided that the good aspects of the bill outweighed the bad, whereas McCain determined that voting against the good parts of the bill was necessary to send a message about pork barrel projects, which he has consistently criticized.

While visiting a nuclear power facility in Michigan last Tuesday, McCain responded to his opponent’s commercial and the allegation that he was in the pocket of Big Oil by criticizing Obama’s support for the energy bill: “I think he might be a little bit confused because when the energy bill came to the floor of the Senate, full of goodies and breaks for the oil companies, I voted against it. Senator Obama voted for it. People care not only what you say but how you vote.”

By Thursday he had found a much pithier message, telling a crowd in Ohio, “I know he hasn’t been in the Senate that long, but even in the real world, voting for something — voting for something means you support it, and voting against something means you oppose it.”

But the U.S. Senate isn’t quite the “real world,” and voting against something there doesn’t always mean you oppose all of it — especially when a bill is already certain to pass. In a place where compromise and concession are part and parcel of productivity, senators often feel forced to vote for bills they feel are less than perfect in order to achieve their ultimate goal. McCain is opposed to that practice.

“The system is so badly broken that they try to present us with a choice of voting for stuff that has pork barrel projects in it and some good things in it to force us to vote for them,” McCain told reporters on his plane last week when asked about his opposition to the energy bill. “I have consistently voted against those kind of entrapments because then pork barrel projects and the good deals and the benefits never stop.”

Obviously, McCain hasn’t said “no” to every bill that contained earmarks. In fact, he’s voted for specific earmarks that he regularly lambastes on the stump, including $3 million to study the DNA of bears in Montana (McCain often tells audiences that he isn’t sure if that was “a paternity issue or a criminal issue”). Still, McCain prides himself on his record of voting against bills that he sees as the products of a “corrupt” system, often bragging about his earmark-free tenure in Congress and promising crowds that he will put an end to the practice if elected president.

“Public money should serve the public good,” McCain told a crowd at the Disabled American Veterans conference in Las Vegas last weekend. “And if it’s me sitting in the Oval Office, at the Resolute desk, those wasteful spending bills are going the way of all earmarks, straight back to the Congress with a veto. And you will know their names and I’ll make them famous.”

Back on his campaign plane, McCain said that this is the fundamental difference between himself and Obama.

“There’s a clear difference between someone who nearly a million dollars a day proposes pork barrel projects and therefore would support a bill that has lots of pork in it,” McCain said, referring to the total value of Obama’s requested earmarks. “Between those of us who are reformers, who are trying to fix the system and saying, no, no, we’re not going to take the pork. We’re not going to take the special-interest deals that ends up with people in federal prison, with people indicted, and there will be more indictments…. So it’s a difference between the reformers and the ‘go along to get along’ system.”

It’s probably not fair to simply label Obama as a part of the “go along to get along” system, but his support of the 2005 energy bill suggest a willingness to play Washington’s game for what he sees as a greater good — or at least a “step” in the right direction. Although McCain has supported many compromises during his time in the Senate, and he has said that many of those bills did not turn out exactly as he would have written them, he has also been much more willing to vote against something because, in his view, the bad outweighed the good.

So despite the Obama campaign’s reliance on buzzwords such as “hope” and “change,” when it comes to reforming the system in Washington, Obama may actually be more of a pragmatist, while McCain may be the real idealist in the race.

Source — MSNBC

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. – Two years after a strict abortion ban here was overturned by voters, backers have brought a similar measure — but one laced with complexities that could bode well for its passage, and ultimately could bring about the challenge to Roe v. Wade desired by abortion foes nationwide.

The referendum has sparked a door-to-door battle to persuade voters that is gaining national attention. Proponents and foes of the ban aim to raise millions of dollars for ads and other campaign expenses.

Groups opposing the ban are planning an event Tuesday in Washington, D.C., that will feature the leaders of the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood Federation of America and NARAL Pro-Choice America. Supporters of the ban are gathering endorsements from conservative leaders, such as Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, an influential lobbying group.

“While South Dakota accounts for only 0.1% of all abortions, it has a potentially disproportionate effect on public policy, because people are seeking to create a vehicle to overturn Roe,” says Sarah Stoesz, president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood for Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota.

South Dakota, with a population of less than 800,000, bestows just three electoral votes. But the abortion fight nevertheless has implications for the presidential election, because the new president could change the makeup of a Supreme Court that might reconsider Roe v. Wade. That 1973 ruling, based on a Texas case, held that a woman’s right to have an abortion is covered by privacy rights protected by the Constitution. If it were overturned, regulation of abortion would revert to state governments.

Two years ago, South Dakota voters rejected an abortion ban in a referendum, 56% to 44%. But polls then showed that many who voted against the ban would have switched sides if the proposal had made exceptions for women impregnated through rape or incest.

Those exceptions — as well as one for women in poor health — are included in the new measure. But they are far from simple; the full text of the proposed law is more than 2,400 words. In the voting booth this November, citizens will be presented only a 249-word summary. Abortion-rights advocates say the exceptions are so narrowly drawn as to be meaningless.

“We need to help people understand that the exceptions are very complicated — this is still a total ban,” says Jan Nicolay, co-chairwoman of the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families, a group that includes ministers, business organizations, Planned Parenthood and other individuals and organizations who oppose the ban.

On the contrary, say ban supporters, they have to win over abortion foes who feel a new law should contain zero exceptions. Outside a VoteYesForLife.com tent at a Christian music festival last month in Rapid City, Beth Perkins, a 54-year-old nurse, said she will reluctantly vote for the ban despite her discomfort with the exceptions. “I know [of similar] situations with other people where they didn’t get an abortion,” she said.

Patti Giebink, the group’s treasurer and an obstetrician and gynecologist, handed out a written statement from the Roman Catholic bishop of Sioux Falls, which said that Catholics could vote for the ban in good conscience. As she handed the statement to people, she told them, “This lays the foundation for the next step” — a more-stringent ban like the one that failed in 2006.

Dr. Giebink says she worked part time as an abortion doctor in the 1990s, but says she stopped after becoming troubled by the contrast of performing abortions at one job and delivering premature infants at the other. “There’s no way to go back and restore the life I took, but I need to work to change the laws that don’t protect life,” she says.

Several states have added legal barriers to abortion, and advocates are seeking more restrictions. In Colorado, voters in November will consider a “personhood” amendment that would grant state constitutional protections from the time of fertilization. Though the amendment wouldn’t automatically outlaw abortion, it is designed to create the legal foundation for a ban.

South Dakota has become a focal point of the debate largely because of Leslee Unruh, an activist who pushed the 2006 ban and helped get this year’s measure on the ballot.

After having an abortion she says she now regrets, Ms. Unruh, 53, founded the Alpha Center, which counsels women on alternatives to abortion, and the National Abstinence Clearinghouse in Sioux Falls, which promotes abstinence-only sex education. She says her goal is to see Roe v. Wade overturned. “We believe this is historical,” she says.

Abortion already is limited in South Dakota. Women who want an elective abortion usually must go to the Planned Parenthood clinic in Sioux Falls, which performed 701 abortions last year. Doctors travel there from Minnesota because few local physicians will perform abortions. A recent federal court ruling on a 2005 state law requires doctors to tell patients an abortion will “terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.”

Ban proponents hope it would be challenged in court and eventually entice the Supreme Court to revisit Roe. That is where the presidential race comes in. Democratic Sen. Barack Obama has said abortion should remain legal and wants to preserve Roe, while Republican Sen. John McCain wants Roe to be overturned.

The exceptions in the new South Dakota proposal create some knotty questions for voters. For instance, should a woman be forced to continue a pregnancy if the fetus isn’t going to survive? How ill must a woman be to qualify for an abortion under an exception for a woman in poor health?

The health exception permits an abortion if there is a “serious risk” of a “substantial and irreversible impairment” of a major organ or system. But doctors could be prosecuted if they are found to have disregarded “accepted standards of medical practice.”

Marvin Buehner, a Rapid City obstetrician and gynecologist who is campaigning against the ban, says he has performed abortions for seriously ill patients, including a woman with rectal cancer who needed chemotherapy and radiation. But he says he wouldn’t perform that abortion if the ban passed, at the risk of spending 10 years in prison. The phrase “accepted standards of medical practice,” he adds, “is so vague and nebulous that no physicians I know, myself included, would take the chance.”

One Saturday last month, the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families, which opposes the ban, dispatched volunteers to a Sioux Falls neighborhood to explain the nuances of the ban’s exceptions.

The canvassing wasn’t easy. Most people appeared to be uncomfortable discussing the topic. Many barely opened their doors. A middle-aged man peeking around his screen door asked 29-year-old volunteer Jonathan Drew: “You’re for abortion? You’re for choice?” Mr. Drew responded, “We’re saying the ban is too restrictive.” The man accepted a flier and shut the door.

Ms. Nicolay, the group’s co-chairwoman, says the group plans to raise money statewide and nationally, through house parties and online solicitations. Canvassers aim to visit or call thousands of homes. She says she remains optimistic that voters will defeat the ban. “I still believe people do not want the government telling them what to do,” she says.

Source — The Wall Street Journal

Sane voters typically don’t pay attention when a presidential campaign shakes up its staff. And most of the time, they’re right to tune out. Except when it comes to John McCain. Over the past eight years, three Republican operatives have served as the Arizona senator’s right-hand men, guiding him through a pair of presidential runs–and determining, to a remarkable degree, the tone and direction of his career for the duration of their tenure at the top. Now, 10 days after several aides warned McCain that he “was in danger of losing the presidential election,” he’s added a fourth name to the list: Steve Schmidt. Here, we explore how McCain’s previous gurus shaped his candidacies–and anticipate where Schmidt will take him next.

The Maverick: John Weaver

Everything we now consider “quintessentially McCain” can be traced back to him. A lanky, brooding, volatile Texan, Weaver convinced the longshot Arizona senator to challenge George W. Bush for the Republican nomination in 2000–and, as top strategist, lovingly oversaw every aspect of that year’s “maverick” campaign. “Weaver’s the guy who stayed on top of him [and] said, ‘Not only should you run but I have a plan to get you there,” McCain spokesman Howard Opinksy told the Washington Post at the time. Among his ideas: McCain’s trademark “town hall meetings,” which the candidate recently called “the most important part, in my view, of the process”; the “Straight Talk Express,” named over a bottle of merlot; and freewheeling, unfettered access for reporters. Weaver’s mantra: “Let McCain Be McCain.” Circa February 2000, Bush had 174 staffers. McCain got by with 80–none of whom, thanks to Weaver, was allowed to “handle” the candidate. McCain was droll, darkly humorous, fiercely competitive and quick to anger, and so was Weaver (in 2000, he smashed three Nokia phones). That became the tone of the campaign. The strategist despised Karl Rove, a colleague from Texas who once “nearly destroyed John emotionally” over a billing dispute, according to his wife Rhonda, and positioned McCain, the outsider, in opposition to Bush. “In the past I’ve worked for a lot of guys who want us to tell them what to believe,” Weaver told the Post in 2000. “It’s just a chase for money. You feel dirty, like a hired gun.” But no more, he said. “I’m on the side of the angels in this one.” After Rove’s dirty tricks sunk McCain in South Carolina, Weaver left the Republican Party, registered as a Democrat in Manhattan and briefly consulted for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The Establishmentarian: Terry Nelson

McCain’s second White House run effectively began in 2002, when Weaver returned to orchestrate the senator’s public reconciliation with Bush and make amends (behind the scenes) with his old nemesis Rove. It was clear from the start that the tone and scope of “McCain 2008: The Sequel” would be more generalissimo than guerrilla. McCain and Weaver spent 2005, for example, courting the Pioneers, Rangers and Super Rangers who each helped collect hundreds of thousands of dollars for Bush in 2000 and 2004. But the real sign that McCain’s boat-rocker days were over came on March 19, 2006, when Weaver hired Terry Nelson to run McCain’s Straight Talk America PAC (he later became McCain’s campaign manager). Political director of Bush’s 2004 reelection bid, Nelson was, in the words of Philadelphia Inquirer political columnist Dick Polman, “one of the most notorious hardball specialists of the Republican establishment.” Nelson had, among other things, produced the famous, race-baiting Tennessee attack ad in which a semi-naked blond bimbo told Democratic senatorial candidate Harold Ford–an African-American–to “Call [her].” He’d run the GOP’s massive negative ad blitz in advance of the 2006 midterm elections. He’d working alongside one of the principals behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. He’d played a key role in helping DeLay and his money men allegedly evade a Texas law that bans the use of corporate money in Texas campaigns. And he’d overseen the New England operative convicted and jailed for his criminal role in a successful effort to jam Democratic party phone lines on Election Day 2002. The message, of course, was that McCain was playing to win this time. To that end, Nelson oversaw the creation of a behemoth organization modeled on Bush-Cheney ‘04, with a $154 million budget and scads of overpaid consultants and state directors. The only hitch? Nelson was spending money faster than McCain–whose full-throated support for comprehensive immigration reform had enraged the Republican base–could raise it. By July of last year, the campaign had less than $1 million the bank, and Nelson tendered his resignation to a furious McCain. “McCain never bonded with Terry Nelson,” a longtime friend of the senator told the Post at the time. “They just didn’t click.” Weaver resigned the same day.

The Budgeter: Rick Davis

With his bloated, formerly unstoppable campaign in shambles–and only six months to go until the Iowa caucuses–McCain turned to longtime staffer Rick Davis for help. But although Davis joined the McCain camp in 1998–at the same time as Weaver–he was never much of a maverick. A former lobbyist and friend of lobbyists, Davis wore a jacket and tie at all times. He was even-keeled and charming. He was, in other words, a “creature of the political mainstream,” as David Brooks once put it. Unsurprisingly, Davis and Weaver, the romantic renegade, didn’t get along–to put it mildly. It’s “a mutual hatred that is total, absolute and blinding,” one McCainiac told Brooks. Until the collapse, McCain was loyal, in part, to each camp–part insider, part outsider. But with no money and no infrastructure, the candidate no longer had the luxury of divided loyalties, and Davis, a steady manager, experienced finance man and close confidant of Cindy McCain, won out. Recognizing that the Bush model was no longer feasible, Davis immediately cut costs, eliminating jobs, dumping well-paid consultants, renegotiating outstanding bills and asking any remaining loyalists to work for free. Tellingly, McCain’s slick, $10,000-a-day “Straight Talk Express” was traded in for a $10,000-a-month jalopy. “It’s not as nice a bus,” Davis told the New York Times last October. “It just broke down with an alternator problem.” But the bus–and Davis’s back-to-basics budgeting–got McCain where he needed to go. During the second half of 2007, the candidate focused relentlessly on town hall meetings–especially in New Hampshire, which had put him on the political map with a primary win in 2000. Traveling the state in a borrowed SUV, McCain didn’t shy away from his controversial view on immigration or his support for the surge in Iraq—even when he slipped to single digits in the polls. It paid off. On Jan. 8, McCain finally won his second Granite State primary and immediately vaulted to the front of the GOP pack. “The greatest political comeback in history,” Schmidt, then a senior adviser, told NEWSWEEK.

The Rove: Steve Schmidt

Davis’s lean-and-mean, last-resort strategy worked for McCain in the primaries. But it’s proven to be a bad fit for the battle with Barack Obama–i.e., the best-funded, best-organized Democrat in modern political history. Blessed with a four-month headstart, Davis has done little to establish a consistent message, boost sluggish fundraising or shape an efficient organization, and his cash-first mentality led McCain to (counterproductively) deliver speeches on energy reform in Houston and offshore drilling in Santa Barbara because he happened to be raising money nearby. By June, insiders and top GOP officials were growing “increasingly uneasy about the direction of the McCain presidential campaign.” “McCain’s campaign seems not to have a game plan,” veteran republican operative Ed Rollins told the Politico just this morning. “I don’t see a consistent message. As someone who has run campaigns, this campaign is not running smoothly.” In response, McCain has now put Schmidt in charge of day-to-day operations–communications, scheduling and basic political strategy–and left Davis to do what he does best: manage the money. The shakeup comes a year to the day after Weaver and Nelson departed.

So what should we expect from Schmidt? A bald, barrel-chested “partisan pugilist” who labored under Karl Rove on Bush’s 2004 bid–he also ran Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s reelection campaign–McCain’s new guru “speaks in pre-fabricated, consumable, sharp morsels,” according to Marc Ambinder. “McCain has learned from Schmidt that it’s OK not to be a referee, that it’s OK not to play the judge, that it’s OK to draw contrasts with your opponents.” In other words, he’s learned to be an effective (if typical) Republican presidential candidate. Schmidt, 37, lacks his predecessors’ deep emotional ties to the boss, so he’s more likely to assess (and correct) the candidate’s weaknesses with the objective eye of an outsider. That in mind, expect tighter message discipline from McCain–two other Rove vets, Nicole Wallace and Greg Jenkins, have joined McCain’s communications team–and crisper, more consistent attacks on Obama, whom the campaign plans to paint as an unprincipled opportunist (in contrast to McCain, who “puts his country first”). He’s going to sound more “professional,” more “Rovian.” After all, it was Bush’s Brain who gave Schmidt his nickname: “Bullet.”

Will it help? Who knows. That said, if McCain is still trailing Obama by six points in the polls at the end of the summer, don’t be surprised if he calls on John Weaver to, you know, recapture the magic of 2000.

Source — Newsweek